HIJACKERS,
HOOKERS AND PARADISE NOW
Only days prior
to his rendezvous with 72 virgins in Islamic heaven, Mohamed
Atta, before piloting his plane into the North Tower of the
World Trade Center, was reported to be seen drinking and gambling.
Some of the other hijackers spent their last hours on earth
in strip clubs paying for lap dances; others sought solace in
the arms of sex workers. And while much ink has been spilled
analyzing the political underpinnings and psychological profiles
of the hijackers, very little attention has been paid to their
whol(r)esale embrace of Western decadence just prior to takeoff.
Could it be that what they did and why they did it in the hours
leading up to their suicide mission are of more significance
than the death and destruction they wrought?
What are we
to read into their decision not to pass their final hours in
the mosque of their choice and receive blessings from the Prophet,
but to spend them in the (naked) bosom of the culture they would
attempt to bring down in the following days?
Letting the
facts on the ground -- that is from the boudoir -- speak for
themselves, they were observably not concerned that their earthly
desires and subsequent fulfillment would compromise their good
standing with the Almighty. More likely, they had long since
ceased believing in Him in the name of Whom thousands were brutally
murdered. To state the obvious, the hijackers were manifestly
inner conflicted, just as the transference of their humungous
self-loathing onto the West is the necessary red herring that
unites the brotherhood of jihadists and terrorists everywhere
in the world.
For Westerners
endeavouring in good faith to understand the meaning and implications
of what Samuel Huntington has termed “the clash of civilizations,”
the lifestyle choices of the hijackers before bringing down
the Twin Towers offer a telling example of Islam’s growing
inability to hold sway over its flock, and the growing incommensurability
of Western and Islamic values. Which makes jihad and its terrorist
operations desperate, last-ditch efforts to hold on to a way
of life that is being undermined by Western (global) culture.
Islam, as an all-embracing ethos conceived to provide for the
spiritual, psychological and moral well-being of a people, is
on its way out because, in the words of Ayaan
Hirsi Ali, from Nomad, “Islam
is built on sexual inequality and on the surrender of individual
responsibility and choice. This is not just ugly; it is monstrous.”
She argues convincingly that millions of Muslims, despite their
reluctance to enter their apostate views into the public domain
for fear of reprisal, have already signed on to that declaration.
Before the
entire world, the hijackers laid bare their radical estrangement
from Islam as well as their twisted, schizophrenic mindsets.
Where actions speak louder than words and prayers left unsaid,
the Koran was no match against the consolations of the flesh:
Islam’s heavenly heights could not compete with the high
guaranteed by the triple Scotch. Well aware of the publicity
and scrutiny their lives would generate following their voluntary
demise, they couldn’t be bothered to wait even a day or
two for the promise of 72 heavenly houris because the promise
was a lie that had been drained of purchase. Prior to and a
condition of their hatred of the West was manifest self-hatred.
The big lie they foisted on themselves was to hold the West
culpable for their pathologically alienated selves when in fact
their religion and culture -- de facto prisons -- kept
them locked out and strangers to their nature which, incidentally,
flowered upon contact with the West. What sustains and propagates
the big lie is that the terrorist believes defeat of the West
will resolve his inner conflict when in point of fact there
are only two practical solutions: to recognize and embrace the
baseball-capped person he sees when he looks into the mirror
-- or Paradise Now.
Small wonder
Islam designates the West as The Great Satan, the great temptation.
Islam’s spiritual leaders are rightfully concerned that
once exposed to the virus of Western values the good Muslim
can never be as good as he once was. For sure, the hijackers
succeeded in bringing down the Twin Towers in spectacular fashion,
but the West had already won the day just as the West is winning
the great clash. Like all the major religions before it, Islam
is an idea whose best days are long gone. The age of secularism,
whose reach is global, is upon us and the new god in the starless,
byte-bright sky is the Internet whose infatuated faithful are
legion.
Never has the
relationship between Islam and the West been so asymmetrical.
And so much so the West can’t even be bothered to introduce
an equivalent demonizing moniker for Islam (how about The Great
Cous Cous) because there is nothing in the latter’s ethos
that tempts or appeals to the Western mind. If it weren’t
for their oil, the West wouldn’t give the Arab world and
Islam the time of day – and they know it. And even though
it dare not be thought, much less whispered, the West regards
much of the Muslim-Islamic way of life (its systematic debasement
of women, its barbaric judicial system) as infra dig (beneath
one’s dignity). Hirsi Ali writes: “My Muhammad says
my husband can beat me and that I am worth half as much as a
man. Is it I who am being disrespectful to Muhammad in criticizing
his legacy, or is it he who is disrespectful to me?”
Which isn’t
to say that when we allow ourselves to think outside the box
we can’t sympathize with the Muslim father who shudders
when his ten-year-old daughter announces she wants to go shopping
for a g-string, or he learns that his 12-year-old son has witnessed
every kind of sexual act imaginable on a computer screen and
there’s a 70% chance that his children will experiment
with drugs before they turn 15.
As to our sexual
mores, manner of dress, religious conduct and Western law versus
Sharia, the divide (breach) between the West and Islam is gaping
– and there is no middle ground, just as there is no such
thing as moderate Islam -- or moderate any religion for that
matter. When it comes to the Gods and Their commandments, you
either believe or you don’t, that is you either comport
yourself as if there will be theological consequences to your
actions or there won't. And if you don’t believe, you’re
a heathen, and Islam rightfully regards the West as a haven
for heathens, and that includes lapsed Muslims who wear that
secular badge with pride and without prejudice. The moderate
Muslim or Islamicist is a fiction the West has invented in order
to conceal its hidden agenda: to have Islam turn upon itself,
to cajole the apostate (presumed moderate) Muslim to
undertake the West’s bidding. We’re
now seeing that long-term objective begin to bear fruit as more
and more westernized Muslims, especially women, are speaking
out against Islam. The Western Front is comprised of millions
of Muslims who have been told they are moderate when in fact
they have already been co-opted by the West but are in denial
for as long as it takes them to resolve their inner
conflictedness, at which point they recognize
their shame and rage against what is ‘tyrannical’
in Islam is authentic, and that they are uniquely qualified
to speak comparatively and confidently of new found values they
deem more commensurate with their own
Take away his
language and what remains of the Arab or Muslim who has made
his love of basketball, gambling, late night cable TV, mini-skirted
women, wine with his meal and pre-marital sex his permanent
abode, for whom the Koran is just another book on a reading
list, and prayer, even once a day, a downright noose-ance? There
will come a day when Islam will be defined by its political
objectives and grievances and there will be no clash of civilizations
(culture). There will come a day when Muslims will eat, dress,
think and get mad at their computers like everyone else. In
this godless future, enmity will be based on the usual suspects:
economic disparity, race, colour and geo-politics.
For much of
its history and prior to the world-transforming revolution in
communications, Islam was geographically vaccinated against
the ways of the West. But with the introduction of the Internet
all of that has changed – forever. Mere exposure to the
West is all that is required to collapse Islam’s once
indomitable pillars of faith. Nowadays, we hear much of stealth
jihad, a term introduced by Robert
Spencer in his book of the same title. It outlines
Islam’s not so secret agenda to overthrow the West and
establish an imperial world state.
What we don’t
hear about is Western jihad, the West’s purposeful strategy
to overwhelm Islam with its culture. Not only is Western jihad
more insidious than any Islamic stealth equivalent, it is working
so well the response to it, of necessity, has been radical and
fraught with violence. But even the terrorist, who in good faith
has volunteered to fight for the honour and integrity of his
culture and religion, knows that once exposed to the ways of
the West there’s no going back home. The West has to merely
enter a single aspect of its culture (its freedoms, gender equality,
music, decadence) into the Islamic sphere and the good Muslim
becomes instantly vexed, exercised, even tormented – and,
alas, in some instances, radicalized. In especially large urban
centers, from Tehran to Sanaa to Mecca, there are democratic
reform movements which have necessitated desperate, totalitarian
responses. But if history is a reliable indicator, those measures,
however brutal, will fail since it is a law of human nature
that we would all rather be free (no matter what the consequences)
than not.
Any system
or ideology that undertakes to regulate human behaviour but
ill considers human nature in its calculus does so at its own
peril. Communism, flouting the DNA-writ territorial imperative,
collapsed because it short shrifted man's basic makeup. Islam,
steadfast in its refusal to lend an ear to the cry of freedom,
has similarly prepared the ground for its own demise, the fact
of which does not excuse the West for what until now has been
a meek and propitiatory response compared to its relentless
and methodical denunciation of communism that was ganged up
on until its walls came tumbling down in 1991. Are the protocols
of political correctness such that we are afraid to offend even
as our hard-earned values wither thin in compromise? Hirsi Ali
writes: “The thin fingers of self-censorship begin to
tighten around individual minds, then groups of people, then
around ideas themselves and their expression. When free speech
crumbles in this way, when Westerners refrain from criticizing
or questioning certain aspects of Islam, they abandon those
Muslims who seek to question them too. They also abandon their
own values.”
Since the effects
of terrorism and suicide bombings cannot begin to compete with
the Internet as a hegemonic tool, the spectre of the development
and launching of a terrorist nuclear attack is debatably the
most pressing matter of our times and human history. And even
though the writing is on every screen, we’re not staying
on the page. Islam is imploding from within. Radical Islam recognizes
that the conventional terrorism it sponsors will not bring about
a new world order, which makes the apocalyptic solution -- if
I’m going to go I’m going to take everyone with
me -- an option the West must begin to take more seriously.
Is Iran’s nuclear program an on-going development that
should be allowed to be brought to completion?
What we learn
from the 9/11 hijackers is that once exposed to freedom there
is no turning back and that the real infidel is the Muslim who
cannot refuse Western values, which makes the great "clash
of civilizations" an inner conflict that has been outed
and unleashed on the world.
I have no doubt
that in the not too distant future we will all be living in
a secular, homogenized world, sharing alike in a culture whose
salient features will be shaped by communications technology.
If you are among those for whom pluralism is the most effective
response to that future scenario, for whom ideas are only as
good as the competition, you may very well find yourselves looking
back with nostalgia to the golden age of ‘the great clash’
-- and the ferment, fervour and commitments that characterized
that exciting period.
Here’s
looking at you, Abdul.
